


Dead Flies In The Summertime

by Go0se



Category: Marble Hornets
Genre: Alternate Universe - Killjoys, Because I can, Crossovers & Fandom Fusions, Entry 66 reimagined and contxted, Gen, Monologuing!, POV Second Person, bad hygiene, outsider pov
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-27
Updated: 2015-07-27
Packaged: 2018-04-07 02:12:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,077
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4245591
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Go0se/pseuds/Go0se
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In Zone 23 in the middle of the night, you run into a sunshine carrying two names and three masks.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Dead Flies In The Summertime

**Author's Note:**

> Yet another installment of 'people sit and talk about stuff'. Or, MH Killjoys AU because you can't stop me! \o/  
> Background: The year is 2019. After a series of (possibly-)natural disasters and localized nuclear war the continental US is in irradiated shreds. Better Living Industries-- known informally as BL/IND, or just BLI-- is a technocoligacally advanced corporation who scooped up the remnants of people after the wars and built shining Cities in the wasteland, designating all other parts of the un-country into numbered Zones. Battery City was the first, on top of the ruins of Los Angeles; the Zones spread out from it like ripples in mercury. In the Cities all residents are kept safe and clean and educated, given mandatory medication until they're brainwashed and subject to constant surveillance and regulation. In the Zones, the cast-outs and criminals and runaways fight to survive: among each other, with the elements, and against the waves of Draculoid police and Exterminators who BLI send out to destroy them. Zone dwellers don't keep their given names as any connection to a past can be dangerous. They make survival crews or don't, and they keep running.  
> What used to be southern Alabama is now known as Zone 23 (being the 22cnd state that entered the United States union and split into the North and Southern regions), where the bombs and radiation have made wastelands of what was once forest and fields and roads. Valve City sits gleaming and climate-controlled at the head of the Alabama river. This story starts outside Valve, in stinking heat and nearing sunset.
> 
>  
> 
> =====

 

It could've been any other night and you'd've blown right past, out to the skeleton bogs and the flash-fried hills and on through. The trail to your next safehouse is lit up like roadsigns in your memory, the time of your meetup with a local DJ bright as coals. But instead it's tonight, and you're weighed down fresh full of trade from a fair. There's no way in fuck you'll get to the safehouse by dawn so you need a place to crash before you get crashed. Nights out in 23 are kind to no one.  
  
Sweat runs more or less freely down your back and the arms of your jacket as you hurry along. It's barely even a feeling anymore; you're used to the crust and the damp as much as the heat. The ache in your shoulders is less familar but since it means you traded well you're not going to be glitchy about it. You stumble through the rapidly cooling air, briefly considering sitting in the leathery shadow of one of the Pig Bombs you can see on your distant left. But no; there's a light by the hulking shape that could be a campfire. Too risky. Instead you veer towards the horizon, internal compass spinning.

  
The moon is about halfway rose when you finally spot the used-to-be-motel. The only outside door's bowed over itself like a dying person, impossible to open, but the front window sits low to the ground and is so old-broken there's no glass chips left hanging onto its edges. You slide up to it and clamber through.  
  
  
Dust kicks up in twin puffs from your feet as you land on what used to be carpet. At first you don't notice you're not alone. You're busy feeling around the edges of the room that used to be a lobby, looking for give-way points in the walls. The place is damp, gloomy, full of dirt and animal signs. Some of the roof's cracked open but the walls themselves are mostly whole. The hallway into what was once the rest of the building is blocked by a bunch of fallen insulation, so a body could be sure they were the only person who had a way in. Not a bad place to overnight. If you wanted to. You're kicking at a scurrier spot on the floor, calculating mileage and travel time.  
There's a shuffle from the only corner you haven't looked at.  
In a heartbeat you turn instinctively, good hand holding Rapid straight and solid toward the noise. With your other hand you shake on the chem light you carry on the side of your belt opposite your holster, cursing in your head for not having lit up sooner. The white light sputters and then steadies, filling the small room.  
A runner's standing there, pose mirrored to yours. They're about the same size as you are height-wise, heavier set than you otherwise and steady-looking on their feet. They've got one weapon you can see: zapper, standard, right-handed, barrel shining in the new light and trained on you. Feathering's more dark than most Runners take but covered with dust like everyone outside Valve City limits. What you can see of hair is dark and dusty too. A black fabric mask is pushed up over the front of their hair. Face filled out but still hungry at the edges; framed by dark smudges, either hair or ash, sweeping down the sides of their face and curved under their jaw.  
Doesn't look like a skinripper, you note quick. No bloodstains, no teeth necklaces, no harshness to the strains of the eyes. Bags under them, though. Starshine's exhausted, but a different level of exhaust than no sleep and endless rides will do to a 'joy. They look like one of the ones who've mostly given up.  
Looks don't mean shit sometimes, of course. But you trust your own judgment or you'd've been blasted into the earth a long time ago.

  
Careful not to move too sudden, you lower Rapid until its hooked back into your belt, handle ready. 'Evening, you say to the barrel of the other gun.  
The runner doesn't lower the blaster or return your word. Instead they inch closer into the circle of bright, making their details clearer. The darkness on their face turns out to be part shadows and part genuine beard. When they get maybe three feet away from you their face twists a little.  
You mentally revise your read: they look hungry, given-up, and _unimpressed_.  
“Who're you?” They asks.  
Voice's a little hoarse, you notice. Could be sick, or addicted, or too long with no one to talk to. All three. You don't flinch. Just passing through, you say.  
“That's not a answer.” They scowl but-- finally-- drop their arm. You notice a second mask tied around their sleeve; blue fabric, eyes cut out, fraying at the ends. “Pass through on out of here.”  
Not an unusual thing to insist and sure as hell not one you're listening to, with what's in your backpack and where you have to go as soon as there's light. No, you say bluntly. Here's a good stop as any, and there'll be nobodyfaces out. Who're _you_?  
The runner goes quiet when you say 'nobodyface', which was just the name for Dracs and Exterminators that came 'round. Everyone knew that. But starshine seems _tense_.  
You move a step closer, curious, and then stop. They've got not two but _three_ masks on them. The black fabric, the blue one like it, and a third hanging off the side of their waist on a rope like it's half forgotten. That mask's a full face, painted fire red except for dark sweeps outlining the sculpted mouth and the eyes. You've seen opposites of it on Draculoids, but never that colour before.  
  
  
One mask was mandatory in the wastes if you didn't want your face splashed all over City news and Dracs gunning for your specific blood. Two carried could be backup, alternate identities for alternate zones or crews or whole lives sometimes; or a crewmate lost. Usually those got buried or burned. Three, though. Three was strange.  
And. Well.  
Normal ways if two runners stumble 'cross each other at night without immediately moving on it's terse nods and one hand on zappers all around. On the other hand: you're an archiver. Starshine looks like they have a story. Curiousity's a hazard of the job.  
  
  
You eye up the blaster, take a guess how sharp their trigger-switch would be, then ask your question. What're you doing out here, starshine?  
“All alone?” They spits back.  
You hadn't thought they were alone, actually-- plenty of crews leave one sentry out in the open while the others nest up somewhere in back-- but you roll with it. Sure. Most bodies do have a partner with 'em, at least, you say.  
They snorts, not a amused sound. “Why'd you care.”  
I care about all the stories I trip across, you say. Hands carefully even at your sides, not looking too hard at anything.  
“That what people are to you?” They says, crabbily. Their hoarse voice twists. “Stories?”  
Is that what they aren't?

  
They waits for a while without speaking, then abruptly turns away from you without giving an answer. They goes back to the corner they must've been sitting in when you came in, sliding down heavily with their legs bent up, hunching in on themself like it's a familiar shape to take.  
That's encouraging to you. Turning backs on somebody out here, that takes a kind of survival-trust, even if most folk don't think of it so much. You've met all kinds on your routes and most of the ones who turn their backs to you and walk away like that are the ones you can convince to talk. Plus starshine looks like they've got a visible clock attached to their heartbeat, which tends to make your job double easier. Ones who don't have a lot of time are usually milkshake with swapping stories to fill some of it.  
Thoughts like this are the reason people call you Vulture instead of Verve, but insults're a hazard of the job too. It's and everyone's all stories in the end. With your help the good ones last.  
You walk over to a slouching shape that used to be a intake desk and sit yourself down, keeping your legs up like a shield too. It's good to lean your back against something. The pack's strain in your shoulders eases and you exhale. Be a lot more comfortable with it off, yeah, but you've developed a habit of not being away from it unless you're on your own ground. Especially not when it's so full.  
It's a small room you and the starshine are in, maybe ten paces from side to side. You can hear the runner breathing (a little harshly, you note. Not surprising.) After a couple minutes mote-settling quiet you ask them straight-up if they've got anything to share.  
“Why?” Blunt and suspicious.  
Could swap you for it, you offer.  
The runner shifts a little in their corner, squinting over at you. “Like what?”  
You're prepared for that. Bartering's something you're good with. You always have a page open in your head full of inventory: what you're willing to switch over, what you're willing to dangle, what you don't even want the other anyone to see. People trade goods for goods or carbons, the rate changing based on desperateness; they trade info for funtimes, in your experience. You start listing out loud: alc, sky tablets, parchment pills, a bottle of sweet stuff, smokesticks. The whole night, you add, sliding your boots along the floor to show off the shape of your legs.  
They laugh, a short noise again lacking much joy behind it. “No.”  
Well, fine with you. You sit back up and cross your legs so your knees are pointing out while your ankles overlap. Not your type, am I? You ask mildly.  
“Don't got a type. And if I did,” they adds, “It wouldn't include you. Or anybody off the highway in the middle of the dark.” A pause. Then, a little suspiciously, “Smokesticks?”  
  
  
_Gotcha._  You nod.  
The runner stares for a second. "Show 'em if you've really got them, then."  
Sure starshine, you say, and you turn half-away to shrug one arm out from your backpack's straps. You're in the middle of digging out the slapdash pocket sewn into the lower left side when they speak up again.  
“It's sunshine.”  
You pause a second. Trading pronouns and identifiers isn't a first-instinct basis in the Zones, and there's no real 'politeness' as such, but if a runner's gonna talk to someone for longer than a trade-second it's usual to ask. And if you don't, it's usual to assume neutralness. Might as well. The sunshine telling you could mean he's more serious-headed about talking than you thought. You look over and the sunshine shrugs.  
“If we're gonna talk,” he says. “Might as well.” There's the unspoken: _you_?  
You nod to acknowledge the correction and shoot half a smile. Alright sunshine, you say, and you go back to the business of unravelling the knots in the shoelaces that hold the top of the pocket together. Finally you get them all apart. You turn back around with your bribe in hand: half a pack of City-made cigarettes, the kind only BLI high-ups get handed. The toxins are low and the nicotine's real strong. Addiction's run hot in the wastleland outside Valve City; people have, literally, killed for half as much as you're offering.  
The sunshine's eyebrows raise. “You really think stories matter that much?”  
Matter as much as music, you say. It's a loaded kind of answer. People've literally killed and been killed over soundwaves, too.  
The sunshine's silent for a couple seconds. You think, he might spill or he might not. He looks like one to but initial readings can be off sometimes, even yours.  
  
After about half a minute of nothing you speak up, placatingly waving the cigarette-holding hand back and forth: No shine, no harm. I can move out before daybreak.  
The sunshine's face twists and he shakes his head. “Don't recommend that. Trouble's about.”

  
Now _that_.  
That gives you pause as much as it draws you in. Everyone in the Zones west of Valve up until Zone 26 know what 'trouble' means. Gives 'nobodyface' a new name, tall dark and likely to snatch whatever trouble likes. Which, come to think, could be why the sunshine froze up before. You ask outright, That in your story too?  
He stares at you, eyes all cold and clouded over. Then looks away.  
Interesting. You look around the place too, mostly for show, as you add stuff up in your head. The sunshine's alone with three masks. He's got no stuff with him; no blanket or matches or handradio or rations, or a pack to carry any with, not even lightstick of his own. And he knows trouble. You're no sight at math most days, but waste-wanderers have patterns: lack of gear plus _trouble_ plus the way he's curling in on himself like a pillbug equals somebody who's waiting for a pistol to their head, and soon. You press again: That what you're running from?  
The sunshine squints over at you through his hair. “You got some kinda recording gears?” He asks.  
It's a bit of a weird question but you've had weirder. Just the one here, you say and you tap your forehead with one finger. (When you were green in the business you had pointed to your eyes, until a passing sugarspice told you with two zaps from her gun that dead-eyes sometimes got actual cameras implanted in themselves that way. It'd taken you two weeks to heal your leg up; you'd only barely dived away in time.)  
The sunshine purses his mouth and then looks away. “You'd be the second,” he says, but it's more of a mumbled breath than anything else. He pushes his hand across his face like chasing a tear or stray fly. He adds louder, but still partly to himself, “I've got this one.” Then he scrabbles around by the wall next to him for a minute. When he turns back around, he's holding something weird: a little inactive City Security Camera, the kind that didn't look like actual flies, surrounded by nonsense and wire. It's wrapped up in more wires and cables. Looks like it could record things and spit them back out. A body could send out transmissions with that, in the right Fuck You House's tech room with the right know-how. The sunshine must have done, too, otherwise why'd he keep it? He holds the thing carefully, which, fair enough-- it must've been real taxing for whoever scavenged it. The sunshine looks at the thin bent-out piece of holoplastic screen, checks it against what he can see outtright. Then he looks over back at you.  
You smile, just a light upturn of the corners of your lips, enough to make you look not-menacing. You don't shake the cig pack like you're handing treats to someone's kyote but you do pointedly leave them in full view.  
  
  
His mouth twists again but he shrugs in the same moment, wiping his mouth and reaching for the cigarette pack with his other hand.  
You toss it to him. Then you pull yourself forward and rest your hands on your now bent-up knees, waiting to see if he's going to deliver. His face is hard to read in the gloom, even with your chem-light tossing up shadows. You consider pulling out the proper flashlight you keep in the 'pack on your shoulders but quickly shrug the idea off; you only use that when you know you're alone. You seal off the parts of your brain that do anything but breathe and record.

  
He's definitely a smokehead. As you're fixing your eyes on him he's rooting through his pockets for something. A lighter. He flicks it on and holds it to one of the slender nicotine sticks, taking a deep breath, holding it and then exhaling clouds. (You're glad to see it. It means he's, at least a little, expecting to live. That's good. You're impersonal as you can be with your collecting but you don't wish harm on nobody, either. Nobody who doesn't deserve it, anyway.)  
In the exact same type of furtive-neccesary move he reaches into the inside of his jacket, pulls out a rattling bottle, pops the top off and then downs two of the smooth tablets inside with a grimace. Some of his shakings ease off as he exhales from taking the pills.  
You notice them mostly in their absence; his blaster hold had been unsteady but you'd put it down to nerves. Huh. Taking pills itself isn't unusual; he's far away from the first Runner to actually need BLI's medication. You've met all kinds, and all kinds of vendors. The sellers stole the pills or potions from supply trucks trundling along the highway from  factories, and the runners paid for them with anything they could get their sandy little hands on. They stay reasonably well, reasonably alive. You revise your looking-list again.

  
His hands relax a little around the cigarette as he stashes his meds back in his jacket. He looks at the ground and then over at you. “What'd'you keep the stories for?”  
You don't keep them exactly. You sell them to radio pirates to broadcast as bedtime lullabies, or keep in their stocks just like records. (Some of the DJs keep actual records; you tangle with those ones, too, just not as often.) You tell him so.  
“Well _don't_ with this,” he says sharply, louder than before.  
You lean back a little, surprised, hand going instinctively to Rapid's handle at the noise. Usually folk don't mind you trading their stories around; they appreciate it, actually. One part of them that'll last beyond whatever breaths they pull. So you ask the only question that matters: Why not?  
“If I tell you, you'll get why,” he says finally.  
So tell, you say. As much as you can, you add, Before and After. (In your experience there's always a Before and a After.)

  
He drags on his cigarette for a few minutes before answering. You have enough patience for it, though, so you don't budge. In the archive runs patience is one of the thing's you learn quick or never at all.  
When he starts talking it's like he'd stop except that you're there watching him. The bits that seemed especially painful he talked faster over, trying to get them out of the way.  
  
  
“Short version, there's not much to tell. A sunshine found me, another two's giving me some grief, and the one I came here with ain't around anymore. A couple other people got lost in the crossfires. Way the wind spits, and all.” He wipes across his face again, smoothing the front of his hair. It's beginning to seem a nervous habit.  
“I have some issues. Headshop-wise. It's... tied in with trouble, or at least part of it is. Not that I knew that to start with. I don't even know if trouble came to me, or if it was following to start with, but... it's been a long time. Since I was real small. Barely old enough to get taken away from-- the doctors wondered why the usual dosages weren't working on me, was the start. They didn't understand what'd happened, but, guess no one does when trouble shows up. It'd almost gotten me dropped out in the waste. No use for a future worker drone who doesn't work. But someone put in word for me, or maybe I just got lucky, but they kept me in the Safety Facility for. For a long time. I don't remember very much of it, just all the lights. They never turned off. But finally they got the combination of their smooth whites right, and I got out of the medhouse. Got old enough to be put in school. Just regular Ed, then regular wage when I got too grown to be in Ed anymore. Functioned as well as they'd expected, you know? Kept smiling. I had, uh, hiccups, though. Sometimes. Stuff I never told nobody. Woke up sometimes and the weekend's gone, and orange dust all over the floor. Or, I woke up outside a couple times. Imagine that, huh? Blood caked into your hair, miles from home, no idea how that happened. I was... look, nobody thinks that mindblurring's a good thing out here, but with a pick 'tween nightmares and soft med fogs I picked the fogs. I was stable. Doing... well, _better._ Like we're all supposed to. And I was fine with that.  
Then... then Bluebird showed up.”  
He pauses with his palm on his eye, and your brain is set on the red record button so you don't notice anything right then, but later you'll look back and realized he'd shifted his other arm closer to him. Blue eyemask. Bluebird.  
“He dragged me out Valve in the middle of the night on some bullshit-- just bullshit. He'd... no one had really talked about trouble inside, the Industry doesn't medicate you to do that, but that didn't stop it. Whatever it is. See there'd been people zapping into the air in my work, jus' regular deadeyes packing up at the end of the day and then never making it back in. You noticed, but no one really spoke up about it even to each other. I thought they'd all been moved-- or I wanted myself to think that, accept it really. They didn't pay me to think much. But Blue-- he thought all the time. One of his, uh, one of the sunshines he knew had gotten caught up in the whirlwind a while back on his road. Blue didn't remember but he was trying to find out. He showed up in crusted City clothes outside my work three times but only called me out over to him once. He had all these... tapes. Old stuff, but they still worked on holocreens, and they were buzzed over but had all the people I worked with when they disappeared on them, as they zapped out... you can probably guess what I saw. And he talked about me, too.  
I was there. All the weekends I didn't remember, and the sand, it all made sense watching those tapes he handed me. This,” he jerked on the rope on his belt that held the fire-mask, “Made sense. I didn't want it to, we got into a clap in one of the outer-City parking lots and I-- I hit him, but. There's only so much running you can do from what's right in front of you, you know?”  
  
You know.

There's a pause while he lights up his second cigarette. “He dragged me out to the wastelands,” he mutters around the smoke. “Showed me around. He's. I picked nick to be the same vein as his. Seemed the right thing to do.”  
He doesn't volunteer what his name was in the City; you don't press. Instead you ask, So what'd you pick?  
“Blackbird.” He inhales particularly hard and exhales a question. “You?”  
_Vulture_ , you think. Verve, you say.  
He nods, then shrugs. Keeps going. “We ran together, fought too. Showed up with trouble more times than no. One of us dragged the other along if we can't walk himself.” He scratched his eye with the back of his hand, then waited for a while without speaking.  
You look at the mask on his arm,  
“I don't know where it's from,” Blackbird says finally. “Or why it picked me. Maybe it's my fault.  
“There was a story-- Bluebird had been in a Fuck You House's tech basement, it's where we put up the transmissions what he was so obsessed about. He'd been busy magic-ing up some connections, so, I walked around. There was a story came down from a transistor way up out of reach. It was a radio-pirate; Doctor Death-Defying, apparently all the way over in Zone Two, talking about the static like it was something living that'd get you harmed. And-- imagine trouble shows up, and you hear ringing in your ears, and your eyes get covered over with fuzz and lines. Think about that, you know? Maybe it's the same thing. Maybe not. Doesn't change, whatever, either direction.”  
  
  
You nod. You've heard this before from lot of mouths, little variant details like blips in the signal. Everyone wants to talk about something they don't understand.   
Some were sayin' that trouble came from BLI/ND, a kind of extra incentive to any dustbunnies to stay inside their rigid lines. You don't buy that. You've gotten too many words from runners who've been in that thing's grimy clutches and got pulled away from the light.   
Plus, for one thing, if the first part of Blackbird's yarn spins out, trouble would come slinking through BLI's building's shadows as much as anyone elses. Ain't good for a company to have worker bees lost. The Industry hates anything they can't control.   
For another thing, the Great Fires and the bombs fried the ground and the air from the tip of the west coast all the way down to what used to be the end of Texas: there isn't a single place with air that's _cold_ as you've heard trouble's is, or that had as many trees anymore.   
Whatever it is it exists outside normal space. Double outside the Industry.   
Blackbird hadn't said the word 'demon' but you heard it under his words anyway. It still stirred up some dirt among the Runners around here, old fears deep into them as rivers in the ground. It fit trouble as well as any word might.   
But you don't think that it's an _exact_ fit either. Demons were a kind of accident to God, you were pretty sure, but something He made all the same. Blackbird talking about trouble now, and match-clicking it into stories you've heard spun before, it seems to you that trouble showed up among a crew and crept over them all, like a shadow; its hunger was an all-consuming mindless thing. It ain't come from anything that had a thought, or love of life, whatever you thought God had when he made the land that hadn't been wasted Before. It was something else. Something else entirely.  
  
  
“Alex is out there still,” Blackbird continues. He stares at the glow on his cancerstick like it could tell him something. His eyes reflecting. “Alex's... he's troubles string doll and gunhand. He'd got swept up and that's not his fault but he's the reason-- seven people. Just sand in the wind, because of him. I didn't even get anything to bury.”  
Joys rarely do, you say quietly. You mean it.  
Blackbird isn't looking at you anymore. His eyes shut, face covered by his palm. He stays quiet for a while like a radio drifting between stations. Then he says, “People get picked up by trouble and then trouble doesn't put them down. It's only right to put those people down yourself, only hurt came out of it otherwise.”  
  
And it's as clear an ending as you've ever heard. You nod, running everything over in your brain; his intonations and all else clicking into place in the elaborate shape it'd taken while he was telling it, among all the other stories of dust and betrayal you've heard. Even in around the rest of the desert, this one is up in bits of the cloudsphere-- but as interesting as it was high. You must miss him, you say.  
He doesn't say anything back. His face twists. “I didn't know what to do,” he says quietly. “'Cept finish what he started. We started.”  
So sunshine does have a deathwish. Nodding's the only answer you can give to a statement like that. Is that what you're going to do, you ask?  
He blows out some cancer-tinted smoke, more of a sigh than an exhale, and doesn't say another damned thing.

  
*  
  
  
You leave just before morning. There wasn't much sleep to be had after the speech, but you got enough to keep walking. When you sit up Blackbird is sat by the window that you (both, probably) crawled in through, his expression and face as sallow. There's nothing outside of the window. Nothing you can see. You scuffle your boots extra loud on the mostly-dirt, partially-concrete floor. The air isn't particularly inviting to words, today.  
He whips his head over towards you. For a second there's angry panic in his eyes; then recognizing floats across them and his shoulders unwind, just barely. He moves aside. Gives you a nod that's more of a headtwitch as you pass him.  
Scrambling through the window is even less graceful the second time. You look back when you're still sitting like a snake in the dust outside, and it's to see the strange sunshine light another cigarette. He sits in the cool dry air of the broken-down place, his gun beside him, needed pills in his inside jacket pocket if you guessed right. Holds himself still like he's listening for any sound. He turns his Bluebird's scrap-cam over and over in his hands.  
Either his story's honest to fuck real or he believes that it is, and it's all the same to you. With trouble about and rumours of a place in Valve that can bring back the dead 'true' is a wavy mirage most days anyway. In your head, as much as you can, you wish him well.

  
Then you get to your feet. It's warm out already, humid as inside a mouth, and you can smell dew boiling off the dust everywhere. You close your eyes for a heartbeat to bring up the lit roadsigns you'd been following through your head the night before, then pick the direction that'll lead you to DJ FX's hommestead and start off.  
  
  
You never hear or see hide from Bluebird again. Not that you're expecting too. It's a fast life in the Zones, revenge quest or not, and you rarely see people who talk to you twice. Maybe he actually managed to take trouble out with him somehow. Maybe he'd flown away.  
You like to think so. It'd be a shiny end to the story, as much as anything really ended out here.

  
////

 


End file.
